Half a century after independence, African elites, at least those in conflict-ridden countries, often live in constant fear for their life. Real or invented coup attempts, political assassinations, beatings of opposition leaders, the distribution of death lists, etc. have a profoundly...

Editorial of Vol. 47, No. 2-3 (2012) of the journal Africa Spectrum.

Vor dem Hintergrund ordnungs- und sicherheitspolitischer Herausforderungen im 21. Jahrhundert (Wandel der Gewaltformen, Möglichkeiten und Grenzen von Präventions- und Interventionsmaßnahmen) stellt sich die Frage, welchen theoretischen und praxeologischen Beitrag die friedenswissenschaftlich...

Review of the edited volume: Peter Cichon, Reinhart Hosch, Fritz Peter (eds.), <em>Der undankbare Kontinent? Afrikanische Antworten auf europäische Bevormundung</em>, Hamburg: Argument Verlag, 2010, ISBN 978-3-88619-474-2, 285 pages.

Editorial of Vol. 44, No. 1 (2009) of the Journal <i>Africa Spectrum</i>.

Peace agreements form a crucial element of strategies to bring security from outside: they involve third-party mediators during the negotiation stage and often peacekeeping troops to guarantee the agreement at an implementation stage. Peace roundtables usually involve top politicians and...

Current thinking on African conflicts suffers from misinterpretations (oversimplification, lack of focus, lack of conceptual clarity, state-centrism and lack of vision). The paper analyses a variety of the dominant explanations of major international actors and donors, showing how these...

Football coverage in newspapers is both an arena for and a mirror of political discourse within a society. The paper argues that discourses within football coverage referring to political issues reflect dominant – and, possibly, contesting – “truths”, which themselves are linked to power...

The concept of “structural stability” has been gaining prominence in development policy circles. In the EU’s and the OECD Development Assistance Committee’s (OECD DAC) understanding, it describes the ability of societies to handle intra-societal conflict without resorting to violence....

This article inquires into the potential meaning of a technical term originally used in natural sciences and introduced by the OECD DAC and the European Commission into the rhetoric of development co-operation in the face of growing violent conflicts in Africa. The need to clarify the scope of...